


Everything New is Old Again

by zylaa



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Andy is OLD, Angst, F/F, no betas we die like a whole found family of immortal warriors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:21:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25532008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zylaa/pseuds/zylaa
Summary: In which Andy saw what would become Giza before the pyramids.Inspired by that one tumblr post that points out that Cleopatra lived closer to the present day than to the building of the Great Pyramids, and that the Great Pyramids in turn are closer to the present day than the first human writing.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 18
Kudos: 102





	Everything New is Old Again

She had seen the land that became Giza before the pyramids.

It was hard to know for sure. One stretch of desert blended into another. But she’d first come to the Nile Basin within her first ten years of traveling with Quynh, still giddy with the joy of _not alone_ , still thinking that giddiness would wither in time (like everything) instead of sending tap roots into her soul and growing into love.

Anyway, in what would become Giza, she taught Quynh about navigating by the stars. The air was clear enough to count them all. When she said as much, Quynh said, “why not count them all? We have all the time in the world,” and for the first time in centuries, Andy heard that as a blessing and not a curse. Quynh taught her about the constellations and stories she’d grown up with. Andy shared the constellations she’d heard and retained over the years, which were mostly the ones useful for navigation. But she still remembered some of the stories from home, and a few days into their star-navigation lesson, as dawn bled into the sky, Quynh teased some of those stories out of her.

They did not stay counting the stars forever. A mistake, perhaps.

That’s how Andy and Quynh recognized the spot, once they came back to Egypt centuries later. The desert nights were not as dark, but the stars remained. They hadn’t learned yet that even stars could die.

The pyramids shone, but the marble casing and the golden caps weren’t the wonder. The sheer size of the things! The sharpness and precision of geometry, so simple yet breathtaking. This was something new under the sun.

Two thousand years later, give or take a few hundred, she and Quynh attended an Athenian play about themselves, or rather, about the divine figures the Athenians had created in their images. It was a bad, bad play. She and Quynh tried not to draw attention to themselves, so Quynh bruised a rib (instantly healed) trying to stifle laughter. The actor playing Andy was so melodramatic that the way he said, “My sword! My _sword!”_ became an inside joke between the two of them. They’d shout, “My _sword!”_ at each other in the heat of battle, cackling every time with all the laughter they’d hidden.

(Sometime in the late 1700s, in land that was becoming Russia, Joe yelled for “my sword!” during a battle, and she just stopped fighting, right there, and let herself be killed three times straight before Joe and Nicky got her out.)

So in this terrible play about bastardizations of Andy and Quynh, the chorus began some supposedly profound rumination about the ravages of time, purloined from at least three greater plays and mashed together into an unholy abomination. Maybe that’s why the play claimed that after these two demigodesses helped win the Trojan War, Athena called upon them to build the great pyramids. After the Trojan War! _After!_ When at least a thousand years must have passed between the first time they’d laid eyes on the pyramids and when they first heard about the war in Troy (they’d been over in the Shang Dynasty when the war actually happened).

That’s when Andy realized that the Great Pyramids were more than half her age, now, even if her reckoning was off by a few centuries. That moment of awe that she’d carried with her all these years as the emblem of something truly _new_ had become part of the great undifferentiated soup of ancient history. It might as well have been the paintings on cave walls she’d found, when she was young and the immortality so new. _That_ was what _ancient_ meant, to her. And she’d bet a whole amphora of wine that none of the other playgoers saw a difference.

She tried to explain all this to Joe and Nicky and Booker when she first met each of them. That to her, the pyramids meant novelty. They laughed. Kind laughter, but laughter nonetheless. They hadn’t known yet what it was like to live so long your own past blended together and centuries swapped around in your head as easily as the faces of strangers on the street.

The pyramids had been different.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to @sigaloenta for advising on what ancient Athenians thought of as ancient history!


End file.
